There is one way in which Huffman codes are better: they are easier to explain a... | Hacker News

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		lazamar on July 4, 2024 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Building a data compression utility in Haskell usi... There is one way in which Huffman codes are better: they are easier to explain and simpler to implement. I went for simplicity of exposition in the post, but arithmetic coders can indeed get arbitrarily close to the entropy, which is not quite the case with Huffman.

nottorp on July 4, 2024 [–]

> easier to explain

I think Huffman is the one compression algorithm that compresses stuff significantly that can fit on the proverbial napkin, so it's a good start.

The others require the whole napkin stack at the table.

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